This project is part of Documenting the American South and involves the digitization of 26 volumes, published between 1896 and 1907, of documents and materials from throughout the country and from several European repositories covering the earliest days of North Carolina's settlement by Europeans through the ratification of the United States Constitution. Hugh Cayless is the head of Digital Library Technology at the University of North Carolina

The CSR Online: Print Index to Linkbase

The Colonial and State Records of North Carolina (CSR) was published as twenty-six volumes between 1886 and 1907, with a four-volume master index. It collects documents and materials from throughout the country and from several European repositories covering the earliest days of North Carolina's settlement by Europeans through the ratification of the United States Constitution. Many of these documents were transcribed from handwritten originals that are difficult to read, and some of the originals have disappeared since publication. In 2005, Documenting the American South (http://docsouth.unc.edu) was awarded a grant by the North Carolina State Library to digitize the CSR, which has been has been an extraordinary resource for students of North Carolina’s history for over one hundred years. All thirty volumes are being converted to Text Encoding Initiative XML, and will be published using a new system built on top of the eXist XML database. The talk will focus on how the project plans to leverage the digitized indexes (which constitute, after some post-processing, a quite sophisticated linkbase and standoff semantic markup system) to increase the functionality of the online CSR and its usefulness as a research tool.

Hugh Cayless holds a Ph.D. in Classics and a Masters in Information Science, both from UNC Chapel Hill. He has worked in both the Academic Computing and Commercial worlds during the last 10 years, and is a founding member of EpiDoc (http://epidoc.sf.net). Hugh has recently become Head of Technology Research and Development at UNC Chapel Hill’s new Digital Library. He is actively trying to figure out what that means.